Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Anachronistic fruit

It's about fruit and their relation to animals, in particular when it comes to seed dispersal. Osage-Oranges for example may have relied on Giant Sloths or mammoths to eat their fruit or on an extinct horse species - these days, horses and mules will sometimes eat the fruit, too.
It seems that the Osage-Orange hasn't relied too much on those animals, so it's still around, but other plants are completely dependent on animals, like Yucca and Yucca moths. I find the relationships between plants and animals (including humans) fascinating and the article made a very interesting read.